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[ excerpt ]
book view
also by the author:
An Anthology of Plays
interview with the translator here
events:
Publication supported by the Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport of the Republic of Austria.
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abject, backwoods, caesar
A Human Menagerie
by Werner Schwab
translated from the German by Alexander Booth
Known primarily for his provocative plays and visual art, this was the only prose work Werner Schwab
published during his lifetime. Taking 17th- and 18th-century morality tales and their portrayals of
aristocratic and bourgeois behavior as a model, Schwab eschews simple description
or merely mocking his human typologies and aims for utter annihilation. His characters are paraded in alphabetical
order from A to Z without the least ironic sympathy, becoming victims of an ultimate deconstruction,
mercilessly probed, violated, and butchered, as the world in which they have made themselves at home is dismantled
piece by piece. The instrument of this slaughter, as well as additional victim, is the language itself, which Schwab wields as
a scalpel, or cleaver, to slice open
this “human material” and remove with cruel detachment everything personal and
alive that might give rise to sentimentality, leaving his character types naked on the page. It is a disruptive,
discomfiting language that constantly mangles syntax and ignores conventional expression to test the very limits of
intelligibility, a hyperbolic and scatological idiom replete with images of surreal violence and degradation – yet
not without black humor and its own unique poetic sensibility – that reveals the barbarity lying just below the
surface of “respectable” society and its cozy modes of speech.
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Schwab – genius, monster, creep.
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— Die Zeit
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A grand document of literary disillusionment, drunk on language.
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— Neue Zürcher Zeitung
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ISBN 9788088628163
150 pp, 140 x 200 mm
softcover with flaps
prose
publication:
spring 2027
pre-order directly:
airmail postage & handling incl.
will ship in February 2027
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